1. Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments are related to internet advertising and more particularly to systems and method for rewriting queries in a search ad marketplace.
2. Background
Internet advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry and is growing at double digit rates in recent years. It is also the major revenue source for internet companies such as Yahoo!® that provide advertising networks that connect advertisers, publishers, and Internet users. As an intermediary, these companies are also referred to as advertiser brokers or providers. New and creative ways to attract attention of users to advertisements (“ads”) or to the sponsors of those advertisements help to grow the effectiveness of online advertising, and thus increase the growth of sponsored and organic advertising. Publishers partner with advertisers, or allow advertisements to be delivered to their web pages, to help pay for the published content, or for other marketing reasons.
Search engines assist users in finding content on the Internet. In the search ad marketplace, ads are displayed to a user alongside the results of a user's search. Ideally, the displayed ads will be of interest to the user resulting in the user clicking through an ad. In order to increase the likelihood of a user clicking through the ad, an ad may be selected for display by matching terms contained in the search with the ad. Such systems work well in many situations, but in other situations a limited number or even no ads may match the terms of the search. To combat this problem, query rewriting is often used to broaden the number of ads matched to the query terms. In query rewriting, the search terms are rewritten into related terms based on a goal such as relevance.
The traditional use of query rewrites has generally been successful in a desktop environment. However, other types of devices for accessing the Internet are growing more common. Such devices may have limited user interfaces or their usage models may vary compared to a desktop computer. It would be beneficial to rewrite queries that maximized the search ad marketplace for all devices.